Six months.

Ingrid grows and develops so fast that sometimes I feel like she changes overnight. During the last month she has become so much more of a person, with character and habits and quirks of her own. Every day she seems to become more alert and aware of what is going on around her.

In less than a month she has learned to sit without support, although I do keep a pillow behind her so she doesn’t hit the floor when she falls. She can even twist and look over her shoulder without falling, and lean forward to pick up a toy and then straighten herself again. Very impressive, considering that she could barely sit at all a month ago.

And now that she has seen how nice it is to sit – how easy it is to reach for toys and what a great view one gets – she no longer accepts lying down. (Would you prefer to lie down all day, or to sit up and see what’s going on around you?) Now she rarely spends more than a minute lying down before she not-so-discreetly requests to be lifted up to sitting again.

Her hands can now not just pick things up but also pass them from one hand to the other, turn them around and drop them. And they can splash water in the bathtub. (Speaking of baths, we have definitely abandoned the bath support and she now sits up in the bath. Wobbly and scary, but it works.) The hands still have a life of her own, wandering around and gripping whatever they touch, even if she is busy with something else and not even looking at her hands. And they grip VERY HARD, so hard it hurts, because her grip is still all-or-nothing.

She is still very physically and visually oriented. She is strong and likes to move and be active. She also likes to see things happen – when she gets grumpy, my first move is to put her in a sling and let her watch me hang laundry or empty the dishwasher. She isn’t particularly interested in sounds or talking, however: apparently most children babble quite a lot at this age but I haven’t heard her babbling much at all.

Five months yesterday.

What have we done this past month? Ingrid has chewed and licked on a lot of things, above all. Hands. Toys. Spoons. Front bar of buggy. Empty milk carton.

In order to be able to chew on things, she has learned to grip them and take them to her mouth. That’s still very much a hit-or-miss procedure – her hand literally misses the thing she wants to grab, or misses the mouth and hits the ear instead. But she understands the concept, she just needs to practice. For now, it isn’t her preferred approach: she would rather dive with her mouth towards the toy than bring the toy towards the mouth.

For a while she was also interested in her feet and was pulling at them all the time, as soon as I lay her on the play mat. But then suddenly lying down became BOOOH-RING!!! and now she only accepts it grudgingly for short periods. She really wants to sit up all the time. And not in the same place all the time, please – she wants new things to play with or look at. Unfortunately she isn’t really able to sit up for very long without being strapped into something or other. Her toys, on the other hand, are not strapped in and tend to fall to the floor rather frequently, so sitting and playing in the highchair can be rather frustrating for both of us. But when I put her down to sit on the floor, where she can reach her toys, she sort of scrunches up into a little uncomfortable heap, and then topples. Sometimes head first and crying, sometimes just slowly and inexorably. Either way she ends up lying down, where she doesn’t want to be.

All this activity is upsetting her stomach – and it doesn’t help that she folds far forward (putting pressure on the tummy) as soon as she is sitting without some sort of support in front of her. She spits up food so frequently that I’ve stopped giving her a clean bib (and myself a clean skirt) after every mess. She gets two bibs a day. My skirts escape some of the messes and last a day or two before they get totally smelly.

Since the world is so new to her, the simplest things can be fun to watch. Me hanging up her nappies to dry. Me folding laundry. Me eating. The plants standing still and doing nothing. When she’s tired and I want her to wind down, I can park her in front of the washing machine, and she watches the clothes go round and round and listens to the soothing sound effects – or I put her in the bathroom and she listens to water gushing into the bathtub.

On the other hand, I believe she’s beginning to get bored with her limited range of toys, and I don’t have much else that she can play with without hurting herself or the object. It needs to be easily grippable, small enough that she can grab any random part and get another part to the mouth, and have no sharp points or edges. Some of the local leaflets and booklets here advertise toy libraries, which I guess work just like book libraries. I think I’ll try to get to one next week, and see what they offer.

This month Ingrid has focused on sticking things in the mouth. Hands, above all, seem to be made just for this. Thumbs are great for sucking, but so are all the other fingers, singly or together. Two hands are better than one hand. She even tries to spice up breastfeeding by adding hands to the concoction, and inevitably ends up frustrated when breast and hands don’t mix.

Hands are also slowly becoming useful for other things. First she started pushing the mirror and the stand-up toys on her play mat towards the mouth (where else?) with her whole hand. Then she discovered the meaning of fingers, and started gripping things and pulling them towards her mouth (of course). Next step: gripping things that do not dangle right in front of her mouth. Next step after that: touch typing.

Still, hands are fun rather than useful right now. Screams, smiles and sucking remain her three main means of survival. And luckily the first one is gradually getting less important. Crying used to be the primary method to make things happen, but now she is also using her irresistible smiles to charm people.

Oh, and of course Ingrid is still growing like a maniac. She has practically outgrown her Moses basket, and her bouncy chair (which is supposed to be suitable until 6 months), and the baby insert of the pram, and her bath support as well. The Moses basket is about to be replaced with a cot very soon, and the bouncy chair is gradually being phased out while she’s getting used to a high chair.

The bath support is still in use, because I haven’t found any alternative… She is definitely too wobbly to sit unsupported in the bath. And the only other bath support I’ve seen was labelled “Up to 8 months / 70 cm / 8 kg”. Well, Ingrid is no more than halfway to 8 months, but she’s about to reach 8 kg any moment now, so her chubby little body is certainly not going to fit in that thing!

Ingrid has crossed that vague line between “tiny baby” and “big baby” and established herself firmly on the other side. She no longer looks or feels fragile. Even her skin appears to be less sensitive: there’s no more crying when she’s naked for a moment after her bath, or for a nappy change. She stays awake a lot longer than she used to, and spends a significant portion of that waking time on her tummy – sometimes up to 20 minutes. Her neck is strong so she is now working on the arms and upper body, trying to push herself up further from the floor. But she is still wobbly as jelly when I hold her in a sitting position.

She is clearly more aware of the world and the people around her. She looks at me, and at things in front of her, and not just lamps and windows. She responds to smiles by smiling and “talking”, and sometimes greets me with a spontaneous smile. She seems to actually experience boredom, and “asks” to be turned or moved when she’s spent too long in one place.

She continues to grow as if planning to beat some kind of record – when we last weighed her she was over 7kg which puts her above the 98th percentile. All of her 0-to-3-month clothes got packed away in the attic around New Year’s Eve when she was about 2.5 months.

Two months (yesterday).

From Ingrid’s point of view, the second month was not much different from the first. She still spends most of her time sleeping, and much of her awake time eating. But she is awake slightly more than before – sometimes even an hour and a half at a time – and she no longer falls asleep instantly in the pushchair. She is definitely more alert when she is awake. Some sort of consciousness is developing in that little head!

Her activity is still limited to looking at things, waving her arms and legs around, and making faces. She frequently gives her tongue a thorough workout, moving it in all possible directions, and thus drools over half her face. Lamps and windows are still interesting, but she also looks at faces, including her own (in a mirror). On good days she even smiles at strangers.

Ingrid is a lot stronger than she was a month ago, and can hold her head up with no help, when she wants. So she is much happier in upright positions than she used to be. She has come to like her bouncy chair, which she really disliked initially, and has even spent some time in the pushchair with the seat in a semi-reclining position, rather than totally flat.

Waking up

It’s one month since Ingrid was born. Time flies.

(Actually it was one month yesterday, but yesterday was a day with much fussing, and lots of trouble falling asleep, so I never got around to writing this.)

Ingrid has focused her efforts on growing, i.e. eating and resting. She has gained about 800g, which – given that she started at 3950 – is a pretty good rate. It took me about eight months to gain 25% of my body weight, and she did it in one!

She has also started to develop a personality. No longer a generic newborn bundle, she now has her own voice and face, and her own gestures and facial expressions. She likes turning her head to the left when given a choice (lying on her back, for example) and to arch her back really really far back when waking up.

She likes looking at lamps and windows, but is not particularly interested in faces. She does not react much to sounds – she does not find them interesting, but is also not alarmed by loud or sharp noises.

She doesn’t mind clothes being pulled over her head, but is very annoyed by the process of getting arms into sleeves.

Her hands are learning to grip things: when something grippable happens to touch her palm, she often grabs hold of it. (Remarkably often this happens to be the sleeve that I’m trying to get her arm through, or the front of my t-shirt.) But I don’t think there’s any intention behind it yet.